A Modest Proposal to End a Summer of Mass Shooting

We are supposed to be a divided country. We are supposed to be increasingly polarized on issues ranging from taxes to gay marriage — indeed, on our very notions of what kind of people founded the United States of America and what kind of nation they intended when they wrote its laws.

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There has emerged, however, one consistent area of consensus where we may least expect it, and that is in the matter of guns. What the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Second Amendment — whether they were protecting the rights of individuals or of individuals who belonged to well-regulated militias — is said to be another of the issues on which we disagree; but in truth we are in nearly perfect accord when it comes to the big question about guns, as the events of this summer have demonstrated.

The big question about guns, of course, is what to do about them — what to do with the 300 million of them said to be in the hands of a population of about 325 million people and so in the national bloodstream.

And our answer, of course, is nothing.

Sure, it was the summer of mass shootings — a summer of funerals, and mourning, and grieving, and hand-wringing, and supposed soul-searching. But let there be no mistake: It was also the summer we decided that we can live with mass shootings. We are afraid of all our guns; but thanks in no small part to the gentle persuasions of the National Rifle Association, we seem just as afraid to live without them.

And so it is fitting that as the summer of mass shootings winds down, the Republican Party is preparing to nominate its presidential candidate at its quadrennial convention. Republicans, after all, are not immune to gun violence; just last week, a man showed up armed and deranged at the door of the conservative Family Research Council, and shot a guard. Republicans have responded to the shooting by including language in their platform that calls for the passage of laws making it easier for citizens to carry guns in Washington, D.C., where the shooting took place.

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That the language was reportedly included at the insistence of none other than the Family Research Council's own Tony Perkins might seem to represent the kind of ideological "doubling down" that has characterized the Republican Party since the new century began; in truth, it acknowledges a simple reality. If the grisly events of the summer of 2012 were not enough to make American politicians think seriously of gun control, then gun control no longer exists as a political possibility, and there is no political downside to blaming gun violence not on the fact that there are too many guns in America but rather on the fact that there are too few.

Perkins's response to a shooting that took place in his own building might seem deeply cynical, if it didn't also seem more honest than President Obama's response to the mass shooting that took place a few weeks earlier in Aurora, Colorado. Six days after the slaughter at the midnight show, the president won praise for suggesting that "common sense" be used in regard to the regulation of assault rifles — and then let his spokesman Jay Carney amend his statements to make clear that common sense was all he was really talking about using, and that he was proposing actions "short of legislation and short of gun laws," because "the president is very mindful of the need when it comes to legislation that we protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens."

In deciding to let the infection of unchecked firearms run its course, we now, as a nation, face the risk of secondary infection each time an American decides to eliminate as many of his fellow Americans as possible with a stockpile of weapons he acquired with a combination of malice aforethought and legal immunity. We now, as a nation, face the risk not only of losing our accepted allotment of 15,000 fellow citizens a year to gun-actualized killing, but of having our hypocrisy in this regard exposed. We say what we don't mean and mean what we don't say, and this is what makes the national obligation to honor the endless rolls of those domestically done in such a dishonorable exercise.

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Which is what makes next week's Republican convention so important.

Republicans have won the gun-control battle. They have made many Americans so suspicious of their own government that many Americans have come to believe that the only thing that stands between them and tyranny is the rifle in their closet and the .38 in their dresser drawer. Republicans have made Americans understand that the explicit promise of the First Amendment exists because of the implicit threat of the Second, and that while the rights to privacy and health care are not named in the Constitution, the right to keep and bear arms damned well is. Most importantly, Republicans have joined forces with the National Rifle Association to enshrine the slippery slope as the prevailing logic of public policy in the matter of firearms — to convince Americans that taking the 100-round mags from the gun shows is but the first step to taking the derringers from their wives' nightstands.

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As such, the Republican Party now has the kind of historic opportunity that only victors enjoy. They have the opportunity to declare victory while at the same time extending a hand to the losers; to reach across the aisle and to relieve their Democratic counterparts of the terrible responsibility of actually doing something in the wake of national tragedies; to inject some realism into the gun debate while dealing with it on an entirely symbolic level; and most of all, to have something to offer grieving families beyond empty words, ineffectual promises, and hypocritical bromides:

A medal.

Yes, that's right, a medal. At this year's convention in Tampa, I think Mitt Romney should end the summer of mass shootings by accepting his party's nomination with a promise that, if elected, he will create the most important civilian medal since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy created the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. This one, however, wouldn't go to artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and other First Amendment types. It would go to the families of those killed by gun violence, to let them know that they are no less vital to the protection of American freedom than the families of soldiers killed in foreign wars, and that their sacrifices have not been in vain. The medal would be called the Bearing the Cost of Freedom Medal, although, because it would be loosely modeled after the Purple Heart and would come with a black ribbon suitable for mourning, it could also be called the Black Heart.

This is how it would work. Right now, in these United States, an American man — and it is always a man — is accruing an arsenal he will use to kill other Americans, not only men, but women and children. He could probably be stopped, if he were from Yemen, say, and planning to kill in the name of his God. He could probably be stopped if we decided to treat guns as we do cars, and require some sort of rudimentary licensing that might make him think twice. But he won't be stopped, because he is killing only in the name of his own personal demons, and because if we require him to obtain a license and prove his sanity the way applicants at the DMV have to prove that they can see, then this, by God, won't be America anymore.

And so he goes somewhere in America, and he opens fire. He opens fire and then he reloads and opens fire again. And when he is done — when he kills himself or is himself killed — we, as a nation, face the responsibility of responding. But what do we do and what do we say, when we know that we will not act? We may grieve with the grieving, and we may get on our knees and pray and we may give and listen to speeches, but we won't do anything, and by now everyone knows it. And so we will say what we do not mean and mean what we do not say, and we will silently ready ourselves for it to happen again, this bloody national ritual that is endlessly repeated and endlessly renewed.

And the President will offer a few common-sense platitudes about using "common sense" in regard to AK-47s, and then will let Jay Carney take them back.

Imagine, then, how different the scenario would be, if Willard Mitt Romney, once elected president, creates the Black Heart Medal. He couldn't — wouldn't dare — try to stop the bloody national ritual from happening, but once it did, he would know precisely what to do and what to say to those contending with the agony of immeasurable loss. He would say, "Thank you. Thank you for Bearing the Cost of Freedom. Thank you for making the necessary sacrifices to keep our precious gun rights alive. Thank you, and on behalf of the American people I give you, and ask you to please accept, this Black Heart...."

Of course, they would have the right to refuse the Black Hearts we offer them, all those widowed, orphaned, and made childless by men with guns. They would have the right to ask instead for the one thing that would give their sufferings meaning, which would be the passage of laws that might prevent their sufferings from being repeated. Or they might accept the medals they're presented, in the hope that the president may finally get sick of giving them, once a long hot summer comes, and he'd rather do anything than mouth those empty words again.